Homecoming
By Bernhard Schlink
Translated by Michael Henry Heim
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £14.99, 272 pages
FT bookshop price: £11.99

Homecoming is the long-awaited follow-up to Bernhard Schlink’s massively successful novel The Reader (1997). Like his previous work, it is concerned with the ways in which modern Germans make sense of their country’s turbulent past, and suggests how understanding that past can be recovered through the study of commonly overlooked texts and documents.

Here the key text is a pulp novel, chanced upon by the narrator, Peter Debauer. Among what survive of its proof pages, he finds fragments of the story of a German soldier returning from a Russian POW camp at the end of the second world war. The account of this journey recreates the drama of Homer’s Odyssey, which he considers “the prototype of all homecoming stories”. The novel captivates Debauer, but dismayingly its conclusion is missing.

Debauer becomes obsessed with locating the book’s pseudonymous author, who possesses an unsettlingly intimate knowledge of certain important features of Debauer’s own youth. Indeed, the soldier’s story promises to shed some light – in ways too complex to explain briefly – on the identity of Debauer’s father. Brought up by his mother, Debauer has long believed that his father was killed in action, but his accepted version of events now begins to disintegrate. What he finds instead are unpleasant truths about his mother’s marriage and his father’s career, complicated by a tangle of assumed identities and necessary deceptions.

Debauer’s quest for truth becomes not literary, but political. And, as he seeks witnesses and scraps of evidence, he experiences a succession of “homecomings” through which he awakens to a keener sense of who he is. For instance, he immerses himself in a love affair, and tries to be a surrogate father to the son of a former partner, as he struggles to achieve a sense of belonging. All the while he nurses his resemblance to Homer’s Telemachus – like him, he waits to be reunited with a father he has never known.

Debauer’s quest for a sharper self-knowledge leads him eventually to New York, where, under an alias, he joins the academic coterie of a radical professor, John de Baur, an American of German origin who is responsible for a “deconstructionist” theory of justice. Debauer is fascinated and repulsed by its arguments; his own doctoral thesis, never completed, revolved around the very different theme that “Justice be done, though the world perish.”

Here Schlink’s novel becomes unapologetically philosophical, as divergent notions of truth and justice vie for attention. Significantly for Debauer, his American near-namesake has produced a tract called The Odyssey of Law. The central idea is that “What we take for reality is merely a text, what we take for texts merely interpretations.” Consequently, “reality and texts are … what we make of them.”

According to this model, discriminating between truths and lies is the responsibility of the individual: “we are likewise responsible for the decision as to what is good and what is evil.” Furthermore, “a person never suffers from his death,” and “death and murder are the transition from a condition perfectly natural … to another condition equally natural.” It is not hard to imagine why a fugitive from post-war Germany might find it convenient to press claims of this kind.

As these snippets may suggest, Schlink’s novel is a detective story served with a generous side order of epistemological spice, and it will not be to all people’s stomachs. The telling is skilfully paced, and Debauer is psychologically interesting. But the Homeric parallels feel contrived, as do the recurrent images of departure and return. Some of the dialogue is laboured (“If there is no evidence to impugn the veracity of the 1961 document, it should be sufficient”), and Debauer’s mental state is often registered in equally clunky language.

More problematic, ultimately, is Homecoming’s sense of its own importance. The slippery John de Baur is clearly modelled on Paul de Man, the Belgian-born literary theorist who was exposed after his death as a Nazi collaborator and the author of anti-Semitic articles. The link is never made explicit, but it hints at the novel’s roots in the wranglings of academia, and an atmosphere of scholarly gravity is palpable throughout. In probing both the philosophy of justice and German ambivalence about the Nazi past, Schlink has created a morally literate work. But Homecoming, while in parts intriguing, is too solemn about its seriousness.

Henry Hitchings’ book, ‘The Secret Life of Words’ (John Murray), is out in April